How Technology-Enabled Collaboration Will Streamline Engineering Economics

The work of fabrication companies forms the backbone of stadiums, skyscrapers, and cities. But the real challenge these businesses face isn’t just creating and installing the puzzle pieces of these increasingly complex designs. It’s also managing the peaks and valleys of multiple projects with factory throughput to maximize cash flow and streamline engineering economics.

Disruptions to supply chains and cash-flow management have always proven difficult for fabricators, and project changes tend to be the culprits. From the smallest installations to the largest interlocking engineering feats, fabricators know that when changes have to be made, they’re the ones on the hook.

However, applying the sharing economy to manufacturing will help fabricators big and small react more deftly to the design disruptions native to the construction process. Fueled by the adoption of the cloud and new advancements in information management, machine learning, and big data, fabricators and manufacturers will become more agile, gaining more control and predictability of their supply chain. Here are a few ways that the sharing economy can improve the future of structural engineering and fabrication.

Read the entire post by Michael Gustafson, Autodesk’s industry strategy manager for structural engineering, on Redshift.